Teaching strategies to improve student perceptions of academic success: an approach toward immediacy

<p>"Teachers are integral portions of a student's ability to succeed in life. However, too often, many teachers do not take the time to develop the necessary skills to become great teachers in order to truly help their students to succeed in life after college. Therefore, I designed an instrument to measure the correlation between instructor immediacy values and students' perceptions of their success in communication classrooms in hopes to demonstrate that teaching behaviors and student success do in fact influence one another. The research question of this thesis was: Is there a relationship between instructor immediacy and student success as perceved by students in communication classrooms? The working hypothesis involved the idea that instructor immediacy values and student success as perceived by students are directly correlated. Moreover, the hypothesis expanded to encompass the idea that studtents' definitions of an excellent teacher will be positively correlated with instructor immediacy behaviors. To address the research queslion and hypotheses, I designed a questionnaire and surveyed 204 students in communication classes. I performed a correlation assessment of the quantitative data in SPSS and analyzed the open-ended questions via content analysis in order to report the data in a mixed methods approach. Findings from this triangulated approach suggest that instructor immediacy and student success as perceived by students are not significantly correlated, but trends and patterns suggest a correlation and implications for future research regarding this topic"--Document.</p>

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Science (MS) in Communications

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Communication Studies

Year

2012

Author dc:creator

• Ely, Andra L.

• Effective teaching--Washington (State)--Cheney--Case studies
• Teachers--Rating of
• Academic achievement
• Communication

Statement dc:rights

• Access is available to all users

Repository record dc:identifier

https://dc.ewu.edu/theses/80

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dc.ewu.edu:theses-1079